Constructivism and Relativism in Oakeshott

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Constructivism and Relativism in Oakeshott. In The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott, ed.

Timothy Fuller and Corey Abel. (Imprint Academic, 2005). pp. 238-262.

Chapter Twelve

Constructivism and Relativism in Oakeshott

Leslie Marsh

I. What is at Stake?

This paper highlights a troubling tension within the philosophy of Michael

Oakeshott. The relativistic stance that informs his radical constructivism gives

license to socio-political conclusions we know Oakeshott could not possibly accept.

This paper has benefited from comments made by Corey Abel, Bob Grant, Tony Quinton, and

Geoffrey Thomas.

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Politically, Oakeshott cannot accept constructionist social ontologies that

are forged in the clamor for rights, an abstract and axiomatic foundationalist

conception of rights, which demands a corresponding morality not deduced from

morally relevant considerations.

Educationally, Oakeshott laments that the notion of disinterested liberal

learning is rendered redundant given the incessant impulse for RELEVANCE, now

guaranteed with sociology as its master.

Scientifically, Oakeshott plays both sides and this is most problematic. On

the one hand he commends science for its achievement against the sociology of

knowledge view that science is at best an ideology, at worst, a tool of oppression.

On the other hand, the constructivist/relativist Oakeshott berates science for being

devoid of any truth-value. Taken thus, bereft of any veritistic notions, Oakeshott is

in no position to distinguish good science from pseudo-science. Oakeshott

therefore plays into the hands of the scientism that has been the hallmark of his

Rationalist and contravenes his own primary philosophical dictum — the error of

irrelevance.

For Oakeshott these three dimensions have conspired to create a distinctly

illiberal intellectual climate, a regime of “ready-made” or approved ideas,

“oppressive uniformities of thought or attitude or conduct.”1 Behind the ostensibly

1 Oakeshott, The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education, (Indianapolis:

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liberal metaphysic of social constructionism, is a reformist program that is not at all

benign. Furthermore, behind the familiar appeal to notions of “social” justice,

“social” conscience, “social” science and all manner of RELEVANCE, there lies a

self-serving illiberal divisiveness functional to a realignment of power relations. In

a word “socialization” is the order of the day — a gross example of an ignoratio

elenchi.

The question then is why does Oakeshott’s constructivism and relativism not

tally with his socio-political conclusions? Oakeshott accepts all of the

philosophical pre-conditions of constructivism yet he cannot accept its natural

conclusion. If Rorty’s co-option of Oakeshott’s metaphor of “conversation” in the

service of his own radically relativist epistemology has any plausibility, this creates

serious problems for Oakeshott: it throws up some surprising socio-political

anomalies for those of us attracted to Oakeshott’s philosophical politics.

II. The Sources of Constructivism

Constructivism and relativism tend to be two sides of the same coin but I will

try insofar as it is feasible, to separate out the issues as we go along. In what

follows is a quick and highly selective history of constructivism: I do not make any

Liberty Press, 2001), 20, 31, 85, 93, 96. Hereafter: VLL.

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reference to constructivist theories that have currency in developmental

psychology (e.g., Piaget) and socio-cultural theory (e.g., Vygotsky).

On some interpretations the constructivism debate is as old as philosophy

itself. Its precursors can be found in Protagoras’ dictum “Man is the measure of

all things, of the existence of the things that are and the non-existence of the things

that are not”; this was ascribed and attacked by Plato as relativistic. Modern

constructivist theories take as their starting point Kant’s transcendental idealism.

We then have the Romantics’ rejection of the notions of progress and rationality

embodied in the universalizing tendencies of the Scientific Revolution and the

Enlightenment. The seeds of social constructivism, implicit in the sociology-of-

knowledge tradition, are to be found in Marx, Manheim and Durkheim: all

emphasized the causal role of social factors in shaping belief. At the turn of the

twentieth century and between Wars with the rise of postmodernism, the leitmotif

was again the rejection of objective truth and scientific rationality. Mid-century

saw “the silly doctrine” (VLL, 22) of the Two Cultures debate.2 The distant heirs of

the first wave of sociology of knowledge theorists have included the later

Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Foucault and Rorty — the latter finding in Oakeshott’s

2 C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,

1959). An equally famous response comes from F. R. Leavis & Michael Yudkin, Two Cultures? The

Significance of C. P. Snow, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962).

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metaphor of “conversation” support for his radical relativism. TRUTH for Rorty,

scientific truth included, is merely a matter of agreement or “solidarity,”

downgraded from any privileged position. This debate culminated in the Sokal3

hoax igniting the most disputatious and bitterest of debates within and beyond

philosophy.4

Alvin Goldman identifies six lines of argument that typically feed the

contemporary constructivist (and relativist) rejection of truth-based epistemology5 —

to use Goldman’s term, their “veriphobia.”6 These six criticisms are as follows:

(i) The argument from social construction: What we call true is a

product of social construction, negotiation, with no

consideration to the “external” features of reality.

3 Alan Sokal & Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures, (1998; reprinted with a new preface,

London: Profile Books, 2003). This generated a voluminous literature — a good starting point is

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/ (accessed April 4, 2004).

4 For an overview of the so-called “science wars” see James Robert Brown, Who Rules in Science:

An Opinionated Guide to the Wars, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001).

5 Alvin Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World, (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 9-40.

6Goldman, Knowledge, 7.

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(ii) Language and world making7: Knowledge, reality and truth

are the products of language. There is no language-

independent reality that can make our thoughts true or false.

Both (i) and (ii) have anti-essentialism at their heart: spatio-temporal boundaries

should not be conceived as necessities.

(iii) The unknowability criticism: If there were any transcendent or

objective truths, they would be inaccessible and hence can

play no role in practical epistemic evaluation.

Arguments (i) to (iii) are prima facie Kantian:8

Premise 1: We can know things only as they are related to us,

Premise 2: under our forms of perception and understanding

insofar as they fall under our conceptual schemes,

Conclusion: We cannot know things as they are in themselves.

This form of this argument is lampooned by David Stove as the “Worst Argument

in the World,”9 which he does not expressly pin on Kant.10 It runs like this:

7 See also Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth, (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), 235-58.

8 Devitt calls this style of argument “fig-leaf” realism.

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We can eat oysters only insofar as they are brought under the

physiological and chemical conditions that are the presuppositions

of the possibility of being eaten.

Therefore: We cannot eat oysters as they are in themselves.11

(iv) The denial of epistemic privilege: There are no privileged or

foundational epistemic positions. The arbiter of all claims is

convention, tradition and practice.

(v) The argument from domination: Appeals to truth are merely

instruments of domination, which should be remedied by

installing progressive social value.

(vi) The argument from bias: Truth cannot be obtained because

all ostensibly truth-orientated practices are tainted and biased

by political, economic or other self-serving interests.

9 David Stove, “Judge’s report on the competition to find the worst argument in the world,” in

Cricket Versus Republicanism, (Sydney: Quakers Hill Press, 1995), 66-7. I am indebted to Peter

Coleman for bringing Stove’s work to my attention.

10 James Franklin, “Stove's Discovery of the Worst Argument in the World,” Philosophy 77 (2002):

615-24.

11 David Stove, The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 151,

161.

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Arguments (v) and (vi) are forms of what Susan Haack calls the “Passes-for

Fallacy.”12

Premise 1: Relativists claim that what passes for X (truth, fact,

knowledge, evidence, etc.) is often a fiction.

Premise 2: It is those in positions of power that have managed to

get people to accept as X.

Conclusion: "the concept of X is ideological humbug."

The argument is invalid for if, as the conclusion says, “the concepts of truth,

evidence, honest inquiry, etc., are ideological humbug, then the premise couldn't

be really-and-truly true, nor could we have objectively good evidence, obtained

by honest inquiry, that it is so.”13

Goldman and some other leading epistemologists14 do now acknowledge

that there has been a lacuna in epistemology in the Cartesian tradition of

individual knowers. They are not denying that there is a social dimension to

knowledge. But to dispense with the notion of TRUTH is to submit to an untenable

relativism

12 Susan Haack, “Fallibilism, Objectivity, and the New Cynicism,” EPISTEME, 1, no.1 (June 2004):

36, 40.

13 Haack, “Fallibilism,” 36, 40.

14 Hilary Kornblith, Knowledge and its Place in Nature, (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002).

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III. Oakeshott’s Constructivism

Oakeshott commentators have highlighted the continuities between

Oakeshott and the arguments that comprise items (i) though (iv) above. Items (v)

and (vi), Marxist in inspiration would have no appeal for Oakeshott.

Consider the following examples from Hacking and Oakeshott. Hacking

offers numerous items that have had constructivist claims made on their behalf and

includes gender, illness, women refugees, quarks, Zulu nationalism, Japan, the

past, emotions, reality, the child viewer of television, the Landsat satellite system,

dolomite, and the self.15 Oakeshott’s examples are:

A rock-formation, a boy on a bicycle, a waterfall, Westminster

Abbey, the circulation of money in an economy, a man going

upstairs to bed or posting a letter, or a volume of Racine’s plays

standing on a bookshelf. . . . 16

15 Ian Hacking The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), 6.

16 Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 18. Hereafter: OHC.

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Stories, poems, works of art, musical compositions, landscapes,

human actions, utterances and gestures, religious beliefs,

inquiries, sciences, procedures, practices and other artefacts of all

sorts. . . . (VLL, 9)17

Hacking’s and Oakeshott’s lists are indistinguishable in the sense that people,

inanimate objects, states, conditions, events, practices, actions, experiences,

relations, substances and concepts are all candidates for constructivist claims.

If the dependence of facts upon human activity means no more than that the

facts would not be what they are if people did not do certain things, then it has to

be admitted that all facts are constructed. This weak constructivism is mind

numbingly banal. This is not what is being contested. André Kukla distinguishes

between causal constructivism and constitutive constructivism.18 The former is the

view that human activity causes and sustains the facts about the world (including

scientific facts); the latter is the view that what we call “facts about the world” are

really just facts about human activity. A more interesting form of dependence is

strong constructivism, one that insists that all facts (artifactual or natural) would

17 Cf. VLL, 37, 65, 66.

18 Andre Kukla, Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Science, (London: Routledge, 2000),

21. Kukla also suggests that there may be an intermediate position whereby the physical

supervenes on the social.

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cease to exist without the continued presence (and appropriate behavior) of

human agents. In other words, there is no independent reality. This is clearly

consonant with Oakeshott’s idealism.

That Oakeshott subscribes to a strong form of constructivism should not be

in any doubt:

The ‘natural world’ of the scientist is an artefact no less than the

world of practical activity; but it is an artefact constructed on a

different principle and in response to a different impulse.19

And again:

Fact is what has been made or achieved; it is the product of

judgment . . . Fact . . . is not what is given, it what is achieved . . .

Facts are never merely observed, remembered or combined; they

are always made. We cannot ‘take facts, because there are

none to take until we have constructed them.20

19 Oakeshott Rationalism in Politics and other essays, new and expanded edition, ed. Timothy

Fuller, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 506. Hereafter: RIP.

20 Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1933), 42.

Hereafter: EM.

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Indeed, for Oakeshott everything is a construction: “The starry heavens above us

and the moral law within are alike human achievements” (VLL, 38).21 To my

knowledge only two commentators well disposed to Oakeshott have expressed

discomfort with Oakeshott’s constructivism: one is Anthony Quinton, the other, the

late Robert Orr.22 The Kantian inspired constructivism of On Human Conduct is

taken to task by Orr: “This phase three self is the one that invents rather than

discovers properties in the natural world.”23

Oakeshott argues at length in Experience and its Modes for rejecting the

realist myth of the self-differentiating object (EM, 10-14, 18-19, 23). Oakeshott

argues that experience involves both perception and thought. In this sense it is

hypothesized. This is a broadly Kantian (and Bradleian) position; and is common

coin in most modern attempts to explain the nature of experience.24 We have

21 Robert Orr points out the allusion to Kant “who confessed himself to be fascinated equally by the

starry heavens above and the moral world within, and admitted his inability to make the twain

meet.” Robert Orr, “A Double Agent in the Dream of Michael Oakeshott” Political Science

Reviewer, 21 (1992): 44-62. Oakeshott uses a similar phrase in “The Character of a University

Education,” in What is History and other essays, ed. Luke O’Sullivan, (Exeter: Imprint Academic,

2004), 375. Hereafter: WH.

22 See Anthony Farr’s obituary of Orr: http://www.michael-oakeshott-association.org. 23 Orr, Dream, 57. 24 See EM, 54: “The doctrine, then, that the real is what is independent of experience should be

distinguished from the doctrine that the weakness and imperfection of our human faculties place a

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learned to reject what Wilfrid Sellars called “the Myth of the Given.” Experience

requires, not just the capacity for sensory awareness stressed by Locke and Hume,

but also the capacity to make judgments about what one is aware of. At a

minimum this last condition means that, in the current argot, observation is theory-

laden.

Such a truism would not be worth stating was it not that philosophy in its

attempt to articulate reality, has been divided by the realist “myth of the self-

differentiating object”, and as I term it, the “constructivist myth.” The latter is of

the view that the inquiring mind does not merely construe reality; it constructs it.

We all accept Oakeshott’s case against the realist myth, but in his fully subscribing

to the constructivist myth, Oakeshott poses a false dichotomy and this creates

problems for him.

The reason is this. Writers in the social constructivist tradition by their own

admission tend to be political or reformist; they have a socio-political agenda.25

This impulse would qualify as Rationalistic on Oakeshott’s terms.

Consider the general form of the constructivist position:26

permanent barrier between knowledge and reality; but it is difficult to say which is the more

ridiculous.”

25 Hacking, Social Construction, 6.

26 Hacking, Social Construction, 6, 12; Kukla Social Constructivism; and David Wiggins Sameness

and Substance, (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), 147-8.

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(i) X, or X as it is at present, is not determined by the nature of

things; it is not inevitable. Furthermore, the natural X and the

artifactual X would cease to exist without the continued

presence and appropriate behavior of human agents.

(ii) It is conceivable that reality (social or otherwise) might have

been articulated and individuated with very different

principles; thus, spatio-temporal boundaries should not be

conceived as necessities.

(iii) We would be better off if X were transformed or even

abolished.

Now what is odd about Oakeshott’s position is this. He subscribes to (i) and (ii)

but his anti-rationalism precludes him from accepting (iii). Oakeshott once denied

that he had “an extravagant distaste for normative reflection.”27 Yet (iii) is the

easiest of derivations to make once (i) is accepted.

The anti-essentialism of (i) and (ii) is clear. Take an explicit example of

Oakeshott’s anti-essentialism. He writes:

27 Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics: A Reply to Professor Raphael,” Political Studies, 13 (1965),

89.

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For example, the word ‘water’ stands for a practical image; but a

scientist does not first perceive ‘water’ and then resolve it into

H20: scientia begins only when ‘water’ has been left behind. To

speak of H20 as ‘the chemical formula for water’ is to speak in a

confused manner: H20 is a symbol the rules of whose behaviour

are wholly different from those which govern the symbol ‘water’.

(RIP, p. 514)

Whether or not Oakeshott was familiar with the Kripke-Putnam doctrine of

natural kinds I do not know.28 Their thought experiment goes roughly like this.

Imagine a “twin earth” wherein there is a liquid qualitatively very similar to water,

but whose inner constitution is XYZ rather than H20 and is used for exactly the

same purposes. We would not say that this stuff was water. What we mean by

‘water’ is partly determined by our causal interaction with the relevant kind. The

surface phenomena comprise a ‘stereotype’, or ‘reference-fixing device’, so that I

pick out ‘this stuff’. We partly defer to science, so that the meaning of ‘water’ is

not determined solely by the individual thinker but also the ‘experts.’ Of course,

28 Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980); Hilary Putnam, Philosophical

Papers, vol. 2: Mind, Language and Reality, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975).

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before it was known that water is H2O people had beliefs about it and referred to

it. The essentialist statement that water must be H2O is a de re proposition and an

a posteriori truth. For Oakeshott, “[S]cientific knowledge…has no contribution to

make to our knowledge of reality” (EM, 217).

If water is a social construction then it becomes relative to an epistemic

community — an interest, a group, a society, a culture. Justification is nothing

more than a social practice, a convention, conversational, explicitly spurning the

question of whether beliefs are veridical or justified. In Oakeshott’s discussion of

identity, he asserts that “It is impossible to say . . . where the environment ends

and the thing begins” (EM, 63). So identities end up being defined not just in

terms of the mode to which they belong, but according to a community of inquirers

or practitioners — every ‘identity’ is thus susceptible to revision. This question is, of

course, a perennial topic within the identity literature but it should be noted that if

Oakeshott abandons the Leibnizian conception of identity and the canonical

notions of identical, continuant, and individuate, there arises overwhelming

difficulties.

So for Oakeshott the knowledge we have is no more than knowledge in the

weakest of senses:

(1) Knowledge = belief, or

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(2) Knowledge = institutionalized belief

The former variant can be true or false, rational or irrational, agreed to or not

agreed to by other members of the believer’s community. The latter, individual

believers belong to a community that has a way of bringing order to cognitive

affairs. The irony is that (1) and (2) are typically the positions of the sociology-of-

knowledge movement, which Oakeshott feels has had a corrosive effect in the

areas under discussion.

Compare these formulations to the stronger and orthodox notion of what

we mean by knowledge:

(3) Knowledge = justified true belief (plus)

Mere belief or opinion is not sufficient for knowledge: knowledge also

requires truth. Moreover, true belief does not qualify as knowledge unless it is

justified, warranted, or acquired in some suitable fashion. (Edmund Gettier

showed that knowledge requires even more than justified true belief.29) What is

crucially missing from Oakeshott (and Rorty’s) account of knowledge is the notion

of TRUTH in the last sense. And this is perfectly consistent with the view that truths

29 Edmund Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23 (1963): 121-123.

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are fallible and revisable. At this point it is appropriate to discuss Oakeshott’s

coherentist theory of truth and attendant relativism.

IV. Oakeshott’s Relativism

Attributions of relativism to Oakeshott are twofold: The first, and the more

common attribution, is from the general perspective of viewing Oakeshott as a

postmodern relativist. The second, more technical aspect and less familiar

attribution, involves the assumption that Oakeshott was a coherentist.

I examine the second view first. On this assumption it is standard to present

Oakeshott with the following problem. It is empirically and conceptually possible

that there are any number of ethical, political, and social beliefs and activities that

form equally coherent systems, with ex hypothesi no decidability on grounds of

coherence between them. And this is relativism (or one recognizable form of it).

Coherentism can inform both a theory of what we are justified in believing

and a theory of truth. Indeed the two can be, and usually are, linked. We are

justified in believing that X is the case if and only if:

(a) The belief that X is the case is consistent with all other beliefs

in our system of beliefs; moreover and more strongly;

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(b) those beliefs are mutually entailing; and

(c) the system of beliefs exhibits overall simplicity and is relevantly

comprehensive.

The real work is done by condition (b), since (b) subsumes (a); and (c) is common

to virtually all theories of justification. Then we can go from justification to truth by

holding that truth just is the property of belonging to such a system of beliefs or

worldview.

A standard problem with coherence as justification is that there seems no

reason to accept that there is a single fully coherent and comprehensive system of

beliefs or worldview from the perspective of a given subject — individual mind or a

collectivity of minds — at a given time. A problem about truth and coherence is

that it fails to do justice to an intuition most of us have about truth — namely that

conditions (a), (b), and (c) might all be met, and our belief that X is the case still

be false.

There are a number of discriminations to be made. Oakeshott might be

expected to reject the idea of a single fully coherent and comprehensive system of

beliefs or worldview from the perspective of a given subject — individual mind or

collectivity of minds — at a given time. This might appear to follow from the

possibility, indeed the fact, of different modes of experience — or, later,

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conversational ‘voices’ — that are incommensurable. Coherence is to be indexed

to a particular mode or voice. Since, for example, science and history are

answering modally distinct sorts of questions, there need be no mutual entailment

between our answers to scientific questions and our answers to historical

questions.

Still the problems about coherence, either for justification or truth, are

simply replicated at the modal level. Take science: there seems no reason to

accept that there is a single fully coherent and comprehensive system of scientific

beliefs or worldview from the perspective of a given subject — individual mind or

collectivity of minds — at a given time.

So it matters whether Oakeshott was a coherentist, because (even when we

have made these discriminations) he cannot avoid the problems of coherentism

about justification or truth. He cannot charge us with his favorite criticism:

ignoratio elenchi.

Two points are relevant to the issue of Oakeshott’s coherentism. The first is

Terry Nardin’s perfectly fair point that Oakeshott’s account of the nature of

coherence is so indeterminate that “the idea of coherence necessarily functions as

a metaphor, not a technical concept.”30 This is not quite decisive, however.

30 Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State

Univ. Press, 2001), 22; WH, 88.

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Oakeshott might be an inadequate explicit theorist of coherence but still, implicitly,

employ a specific notion of it.

This leads to the second point. If we consider how Oakeshott conceives, in

his famous phrase, ‘the activity of being an historian,’ we see a non-coherentist

account of justification and truth at work. To avoid the problems of coherentism

let’s try a different interpretation albeit a somewhat controversial one: the

anticipated objections will be considered later. C. Behan McCullagh31 outlines

what he terms the “correlation” theory of justification and truth. In it I find nothing

with which Oakeshott would disagree. Now here is the controversial aspect: I take

it to be a form of inference to the best explanation (IBE).

IBE holds that we have sufficient reason (i.e. justification) for accepting that

hypothesis which, if true, would best explain x, where ‘x’ is some available

evidence that presents a problem of intelligibility. Its logical form is:

X (evidence to be explained)

Y (hypothesis which, if true, would best explain X)

Therefore Y

31 C. Behan McCullagh, The Truth of History, (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 46.

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Note that IBE is a form of non-deductive inference; the premises probabilify

and do not necessitate the conclusion. We accept Y because it is the best

explanation of X available to us; it may still be false.

Now, of course, a whole set of questions immediately presents itself as to

what constitutes the ‘best explanation’. The matter cannot be fully discussed here;

elucidation can be found in Peter Lipton’s standard text.32

We infer to the best explanation regularly in science, history, and practice.

It is formally elusive, indeterminate in its technical expression, but easily

recognizable in specific examples. Jack has never liked Jill but suddenly becomes

affable towards her. Jill starts to receive invitations to Jack’s parties; Jack also

sends Jill the occasional solicitous email; Jack asks Jill her opinion on a range of

matters and listens carefully to her views. How best to explain this turn of events?

We discover that Jill is standing for election to a committee that is likely to be

divided on her candidature and on which Jill is likely to have a casting vote. So

we infer that Jack has become affable towards Jill in order to secure her vote.

From our knowledge of all concerned, this is the best explanation. It may be

wrong; perhaps Jack has undergone a moral conversion. But we have no

evidence, outside this episode, of any such conversion. If further evidence

becomes available, the best explanation may change.

32 Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation, (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).

23

So far as I can make out, this is very much Oakeshott’s approach to the

nature of both historical and scientific explanation. It is hard to see how else, in

science, he could explain why:

The image of a stationary earth is replaced by that of a stationary

sun, iron dissolves into an arrangement of electrons and protons,

water is revealed to be a combination of gases and the concept

of undulations in the air of various dimensions takes the place of

the images of sounds. (RIP, 504-5)

These images changed because they provided or supported, according to

the evidence available, the best explanation of a range of problems. And the

image of the dry wall, invoked in his later accounts of historical explanation33, is

exactly apt for IBE. We infer the hypothesis that would, if true, provide the best

explanation of the available evidence. We build the wall (infer the historical

hypothesis) that best fits the stones together (explains the available evidence).

(Oakeshott’s “dry-wall” analogy has some resonance with Haack’s crossword

analogy of scientific justification – her so-called Foundherentism34 which allows the

33 Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). Hereafter: OH.

34 Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology, (Oxford:

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relevance of experience to empirical justification without postulating any

privileged class of basic beliefs or requiring that relations of support be essentially

one directional).

Two objections may be expected to this account of Oakeshott. The first is

that it commits the fallacy of supposing that, because IBE fits well with (much of)

what Oakeshott says, that therefore he accepts the model of IBE. The reply to this

is that we know that Oakeshott cannot be a correspondence theorist about

justification, at least with respect to historical explanation, because our historical

explanations cannot correspond to an inexistent past. If Oakeshott does not

subscribe to IBE, then it would be interesting to know what presents itself as a

probable alternative, if correspondence is certainly out of the question and

coherence were not in play.

Even if Oakeshott were an IBE theorist, relativism returns to haunt him. This

is because such inference is indexed to a given subject – an individual mind or a

collectivity of minds – at a given time. A dilemma arises for IBE. If it allows for

ethical, political, and social justification, then:

(a) it must affirm the empirical and conceptual possibility that

different minds or collectivities of minds – or let us say

Blackwell,1993).

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‘different persons’, which is a more natural phrase here - may

justifiably accept ethical, political, and social beliefs and

activities which, when universalized, are inconsistent. That is

the logic of the IBE model. Or,

(b) it must exclude the idea of ethical, political, and social

justification. This would certainly avoid relativism in these

areas.

On a clarificatory point: in the cases of IBE justification considered above,

we focused on justification in believing that X (believing that something is the

case), which may yield knowledge that X. It is clear that, on Oakeshott’s account,

justification will operate differently in ethical, political, and social action as

involving justification in decision-making or practical reasoning, in deciding how to

act, as well as justification in what to believe. This is why the dilemma refers to

‘beliefs and activities’. In the background is Ryle’s epistemological distinction by

which it is widely agreed that Oakeshott was influenced.35 But the question of

justifying practical reasoning still applies. Our dilemma loses none of its force.

35 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, (London: Hutchinson, 1949; reprint, Harmondsworth,

England: Penguin Books, 1990), esp. chap. 2: “Knowing How and Knowing That”; Oakeshott,

Review of Ryle, Concept of Mind, Spectator, 184, (1950): 20, 22; J.D. Mabbott, Review of

Rationalism in Politics, Mind, 72, (1963): 609. In a cognitive science context this ability distinction

26

Now to the first view: Oakeshott as postmodern relativist. The most famous

identification of Oakeshott with relativism came from Rorty in his co-option of

Oakeshott’s metaphor of “conversation” in the service of his radical relativism:36

If we see knowing not as having an essence, to be described by

scientists or philosophers, but rather as a right, by current

standards, to believe, then we are well on the way to seeing

conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to

be understood. Our focus shifts from the relation between human

beings and the objects of their inquiry to the relation between

alternative standards of justification. . . . 37

Rorty’s target was twofold: a correspondence theory of truth and foundationalist

justification. Yet this was no longer part of the philosophical landscape. Ramsey

has been used in discussion of Frank Jackson’s “knowledge argument;” in “Epiphenomenal

Qualia” Philosophical Quarterly, 32 (1982): 127-36.

36 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979;

reprint, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 264, 318, 389; and Objectivity, Relativism and Truth,

(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 197.

37 Rorty, Mirror, 389.

27

had long since proposed a reliabilist theory of knowledge.38 Quine had already

challenged analycity,39 Sellars “the Myth of the Given;”40 and Goldman had

presented a second generation formulation of reliabilism,41 followed by David

Armstrong’s version,42 culminating in Nozick’s reliabilism,43 which was very

definitely in the air in the late seventies.44

Two recent attempts to rescue Oakeshott from the appellation of

postmodern come from Kenneth McIntyre and Efraim Podoksik. McIntyre rejects

the contention that there is a postmodern Oakeshott. Agreed, Oakeshott does not

share the postmodernist predilection for programmatic politics — a point I have

38 F. P. Ramsey, “Knowledge,” (1929). Reprinted in Philosophical Papers, ed. D. H. Mellor,

(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990).

39 W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View, (Cambridge:

Harvard Univ. Press, 1953), 37.

40 Wilfred Sellars, “The Myth of the Given: Three Lectures on Empiricism and the Philosophy of

Mind,” (1956). Reprinted in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ.

Press, 1997).

41 Alvin Goldman, “A Causal Theory of Knowing,” Journal of Philosophy, 64, (1967).

42 David Armstrong, Belief, Truth, and Knowledge, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973),

162-75.

43 Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981).

44 For a survey see Anthony Quinton “The Rise, Fall and Rise of Epistemology” in Philosophy at the

New Millennium, ed. Anthony O’Hear, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001).

28

been making all along.45 McIntyre is of the view that those who would claim

Oakeshott as a postmodern typically (and mistakenly) seize upon Oakeshott’s

anti-foundationalism and his conversational metaphor. But Oakeshott is convicted

of postmodern tendencies not on the grounds of his anti-foundationalism, nor on

the ostensibly relativistic conversational metaphor (though that may be sufficient),

but on the grounds of the relativism generated by his austere modality, his

coherence theory, and his radical constructivism.

Efraim Podoksik46 has made a compelling case for the view of Oakeshott as

a defender of modernism: he seeks to shift our perspective on the familiar views

of Oakeshott as conservative anti-modernist or as proto-postmodernist. Podoksik

does not claim that these views are simply false, but that they are misleading

unless we appreciate the inherent fluidity of these interpretive categories.

For Oakeshott the mark of the modern consciousness is the emergence of a

plurality of distinct spheres of knowledge — poetry, science and history (inter alia).

This plurality, insists Podoksik, should not lead us to derive postmodern relativistic

conclusions — each of these domains are constitutive of their own criteria of

objectivity and standards appropriate to their own subject matter. But any way

45 Kenneth B. McIntyre, The Limits of Political Theory, (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), 156.

46 Efraim Podoksik, In Defence of Modernity: Vision and philosophy in Michael Oakeshott,

(Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003).

29

you slice it this still sounds pretty much like a relativistic position — the precise

contrast with postmodernism is not as clear as Podoksik’s modernity thesis

requires.47 A marked feature of Podoksik’s discussion is the substantial amount of

time he devotes to the place of science in Oakeshott’s thought. Typically,

commentators talk up Oakeshott’s anti-naturalist credentials almost as a matter of

professional pride. Podoksik rightly views this emphasis as one-dimensional:

Oakeshott’s animadversions against scientism should be counterbalanced by his

intention to maintain the integrity of science, rescuing science from misplaced

skepticism and the relativism that is corrosive of one of modernity’s great

achievements. But as I have already indicated, if this is Oakeshott’s view he does

not hold it consistently: we will pick up on this in the next section.

V. Poli t ics, Education and Science Revisi ted

Discussion of politics, education and science are for the sociologist of

knowledge inextricably linked. To this list, one might add history.48 This unholy

mix is for Oakeshott the grossest ignoratio elenchi.

47 For a classification of the many forms of relativism, see Susan Haack, “Reflections on Relativism:

From Momentous Tautology to Seductive Contradiction” in Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate,

(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 149-66.

48 Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are

30

Forty years ago, Snow approvingly associated science with the Left and

disapprovingly the anti-science literati with the Right. Twenty-five years on the

situation was reversed. Gross & Levitt49 associated much of the left-wing critics

(Haack’s “New Cynics”) of science with an “uncritical criticism,”50 an academic

left wing that Roger Kimball termed the “tenured radical”51 or in Oakeshott’s

words “servants of social purpose” (WH, 389). For Kimball these academics

ostensibly concerned with notions of social justice, are no more than a self-serving

industry of intellectual obscurity — this obscurity serves as “badges of intellectual

sophistication and moral rectitude.”52

This anti-science Left versus pro-science Right seemed to be a neat

dichotomy.53 But this was never the case — the Right (at least States-side) is

inclined towards anti-Darwinism. With Sokal, an eminent physicist with a Leftwing

Murdering Our Past, (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000).

49 Paul Gross & Norman Levitt, The Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with

Science, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994). See also, Tammy Bruce, The Death of

Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values, (New York: Three

Rivers Press: 2004).

50 Haack, Manifesto, and “Fallibilism.”

51 Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, (Chicago:

Ivan Dee, Inc., 1990).

52 Haack, “Fallibilism,” 35.

53 Brown, Who Rules in Science, 23, 26.

31

sensibility, the waters were further muddied. Sokal lampooned the worst

excesses of Left-wing critics of science, which he felt was undermining serious

issues:

My essay, aside from being . . . “a hilarious compilation of pomo

gibberish,” is also an annotated bibliography of charlatanism and

nonsense by dozens of prominent French and American

intellectuals. This goes well beyond the narrow category of

“postmodernism,” and includes some of the most fashionable

thinkers in “science studies,” literary criticism, and cultural studies.

In short, there is a lot of sloppy thinking going around

about ‘social construction,’ often abetted by a vocabulary that

intentionally elides the distinction between facts and our

knowledge of them. . . . My goal isn't to defend science from the

barbarian hordes of lit crit . . . but to defend the Left from a

trendy segment of itself. . . . We're worried above all for the

social sciences and the humanities, not the natural sciences. . . .

They conflate science as an intellectual system with the social and

economic role of science and technology. They conflate epistemic

and ethical issues.

32

There are hundreds of important political and economic

issues surrounding science and technology. Sociology of science,

at its best, has done much to clarify these issues. But sloppy

sociology, like sloppy science, is useless or even

counterproductive.54

Sokal, Brown55 and Oakeshott (VLL, 116) are all well aware that patronage has

its pitfalls and that the impulse for relevance is equally applicable and corrosive to

other domains. For Oakeshott these other domains include state interference and

free-marketeers – “a danse macabre of wants and satisfactions”, the vulgar

consumerism which he characterizes as the relentless pursuit of “barbaric

affluence” (VLL, 104, 99)56 Much ink has been spilled and bile generated by the

Sokal affair — I only mention it to highlight that there is much common ground

concerning the worst excesses of the sociology-of-knowledge movement between

ideologically diverse writers, an example being Sokal and Oakeshott — the former

uses the term “conflation”, the latter ignoratio elenchi.

54 http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/reply.html

55 James Robert Brown, “Money, Method and Medical Research” EPISTEME, 1, no. 1, (June

2004): 49-59.

56 Cf. “The Character of a University Education” (WH, 390), and “On Arriving at a University”

(WH, 334).

33

Politics

The politics of identity and the attendant political “correctness” are

thoroughly constructionist and run on an abstract appeal to rights. Social

ontologies are constantly being fabricated from any number of permutations of

collecting features (often essentialist in flavor) in order to secure some new

axiomatic rights. This manifests itself in non-liberal remedies, euphemistically

referred to as “positive discrimination” or “affirmative action.” Other variants

include, the “epistemic privilege of the disadvantaged”57 (or the culture of victim-

hood), and the ideologies of multiculturalism and feminism (several feminists and

queer theorists do reject the relativistic aspects of their ideologies). These

ideologies are all generated in the name of “relevance” (VLL, 19), but in fact they

are appealing to irrelevant collecting features. Susan Haack:

Perhaps the bizarre idea that the New Cynicism represents the

interests of the oppressed and marginalized owes its influence in

part to the fact that, as universities have tried to welcome "women

and minorities," we have allowed ourselves to be distracted from

57 Haack, Manifesto, 116, 126.

34

the entirely admirable goal of making a person's sex or race

matter less to our judgment of the quality of her or her mind, and

begun looking for ways in which sex or race might themselves be

qualifications for intellectual work.58

And this so-called “relevance” is euphemistically called “political correctness”

(PC). PC is in fact an oxymoron: it posits a metric, the implication being that there

is an objective standard being referred to which of course is being rejected in the

first instance by their inherent relativism. And there is the corresponding appeal to

rights — recall Bentham’s famous characterization of rights talk as “nonsense on

stilts”? It is not difficult to see that these abstract constructionist tendencies and

inadvertent essentialist talk (race, gender, nationality, class, and so on) are

anathematic to Oakeshott.

Education

Oakeshott is at his most scathing of the sociology-of-knowledge movement

in his essays on education. The targets are their implicit constructionism and

attendant relativism. Oakeshott’s essays anticipated a whole raft of literature that

58 Haack, “Fallibilism,” 45.

35

shares his concerns,59 often from unlikely quarters (feminists, lesbians and even

socialists). The notions of “conversational encounter” and disinterested research,

the sine qua non of liberal education60 so dear to Oakeshott, have been

compromised by the universities: “‘Academic freedom’ has become a cant phrase

in the mouths of well meaning but muddled advocates” (WH, 390). Indeed, the

most worthless of all conditions is for universities to be a forum for the discussion

of ideologies (VLL, 141). Strong words indeed. Clearly, Oakeshott is well aware

that if science (and the humanities) is to answer to social imperatives, conversation

will be subverted, stymied and muted. The integrative liberal notion of citizen is

displaced by an anti-liberal divisiveness, a consequence of the teacher inventing

alternatives that seem more desirable (VLL, 83, 42). A clearer statement of

59 Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy

and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1987); Anthony Quinton

and Anthony O’Hear, Education, Values and Culture, in J. Haldane ed. Education and the Human

World, St. Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs, (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004);

Kimball, Tenured Radicals, and Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the

Postmodern Age (Chicago: Ivan Dee Inc., 2000); Haack, Manifesto, and “Fallibilism;” Charles

Kors & Harvey Silverglate The Shadow University: The Betrayal Of Liberty On America's

Campuses, (NY: Perennial, 1999); Tammy Bruce The New Thought Police: Inside the Left’s

Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds, (Roseville CA: Prima Publishing, 2001).

60 VLL, 15, 16, 28, 30-31, 34, 68, 70-72, 76, 80, 82-83, 94-95, 99, 101, 126: ‘“liberal” because

it is liberated from the distracting business of satisfying contingent wants.”

36

Oakeshott’s discomfort with the consequences of the constructivist position cannot

be found.

Oakeshott’s diagnosis for a plethora of “pseudo-theorizing” is that it

coincides with the rise of the professional academic, answering the relentless

demand for industriousness in society at large, and often manifest in “the pursuit of

learning for the power it may bring [that] has its roots in a covetous egoism which

is not less egoistic or less covetous when it appears as a so-called social purpose. .

. .” (VLL 113, cf. 152). Academia heaving under the strain of its output “has led

to a proliferation of what may be called semisciences: sociology, anthropology,

psychology, economics, politics” (VLL, 22-23). Invoking these disciplines, I think

Oakeshott is being too flippant here, though it has to be admitted that there are

some very dubious academic programs. Susan Haack echoes this sentiment,

which she colorfully terms “proposterism:”

As preposterism has become the way of academic life,

conceptions of "productivity" and "efficiency" more appropriate to

a manufacturing plant than to the pursuit of knowledge have

become firmly entrenched. The effect, not surprisingly, has been

a gradual erosion of intellectual integrity. We are overwhelmed

by a bombardment of books and journals and a clamor of

37

conferences and meetings in which it is close to impossible, except

by sheer luck, to find the good stuff. No wonder that many take

the easy way out, conforming to whatever party line will best

advance their career, or that many lose their grip on the demands

of real inquiry, forgetting that you may work for years on what

turns out to be a dead end, and that it is part of the meaning of

the word "research" that you don't know how things will turn

out.61

This last phrase is a classic mark of Oakeshott’s Rationalist. Furthermore, the

honorific title “science” accorded much research beyond the natural sciences, has

had a damaging effect “because, in putting on the mask of “science” (VLL, 26),

their recognition is functional to some technological enterprise. Herein lies a

tension. On the one hand these theorists berate science for not having any truth-

value, yet on the other hand, they are impressed with the prestige accorded to

science. Oakeshott continues,

if every department of liberal learning is not itself to be turned

into sociology (philosophy into the sociology of knowledge,

61 Haack, “Fallibilism,” 44.

38

jurisprudence into the sociology of law and so forth), then at

least, none is as it should be unless sociology were added to it.

(VLL, 27)

These sociologists of knowledge

represent themselves as persons who have perceived a ‘truth’

which prejudice has concealed from others; namely, that

everything has a ‘social function,’ that everything is what its

‘social function’ declares it to be, and that, consequently, there

never were and never could be educational as distinct from

‘social’ considerations. . . . (VLL, 102, italics added).

False consciousness indeed! Again, “[E]ducation is not learning how to perform a

social function” (WH, 390). Furthermore, “[T]he destruction of an educational

engagement proceeds behind a veil of conceptual nonsense and historical rubbish

. . . designed to persuade us that what is being destroyed never existed” (VLL,

103).

39

These strong words might just as well apply to the anti-essentialist position

(to which Oakeshott subscribes): constructivists accept a range of basic sortals62

and then ‘adduce as a reason to depreciate the suggestion that any of these things

“had” to be a horse, or a tree or a man, the anthropocentricity, of the viewpoint

that underlies and conditions the attributes.’63

Bona fide liberal education is for Oakeshott:

The business of the teacher (indeed, this may be said to be his

peculiar quality as an agent of civilization) is to release his pupils

from servitude to he current dominant feelings, emotions, images,

ideas, beliefs and even skills, not by inventing alternatives to them

which seem to him more desirable, but by making available to

him something which approximates more closely to the whole of

his inheritance . . . to see oneself reflected in the mirror of the

present modish world is to see a sadly distorted image of a

human being; for there is nothing to encourage us to believe that

62 A term introduced by Locke in the Essay. A sortal provides a principle for individuating and

counting examples of things of a type e.g. ‘tree’, ‘dog,’ ‘man’. Adjectives such as ‘brown’ and

‘wooden’ are not sortals.

63 David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 136.

40

that has captured current fancy is the most valuable part of our

inheritance. (VLL, 42)

Science

Oakeshott’s position on science is schizophrenic. We are all familiar with

Oakeshott’s long running critique of scientism. But there are moments when

Oakeshott resorts to language that could easily be espoused by his sociology-of-

knowledge enemies. For example: “[S]cientific understanding [is] in any case not

notable for its integrity and all too eager to be seduced” (OHC, 97). Again,

“[T]he entire history of science may be seen as a pathetic attempt to find, in the

face of incredible difficulties, a world of definite and demonstrable experience. . .

.” (EM, 169).

One could let these comments slide but it should be recalled from Section III

that Oakeshott fully subscribes to a radical constructivist premises — of this there is

no doubt. There is a revisionist/ameliorant and consequently a relativist critique

that is at the very heart of the constructivist. If science is merely a human

construction, it should be no surprise that it is amenable or functional to

extraneous purpose or caprice, typically political and economic power relations.

Science is no longer secure in its modal autonomy, no longer immune from the

41

sham reasoning of Oakeshott’s Rationalist. Even if Oakeshott the constructivist

does not contravene his own central philosophical admonition of invoking extrinsic

or irrelevant considerations, by stripping science of any distinctive epistemological

TRUTH-value, Oakeshott is in no position to distinguish good science from pseudo-

science.

And yet, there is the other Oakeshott, the protector and admirer of scientific

achievement, Podoksik’s Oakeshott. For example: “[S]cience cannot be

dismissed as having no truth. . . .” (EM, 213). In this vein consider science

education: “[Science] education has had to resist the seductive advances of

enemies dressed up as friends” (VLL, 19). Of course, these comments are modally

indexed. And despite Podoksik’s admirable attempt to rescue Oakeshott from the

relativists, the charges of relativism (section 4) still stick. Still, let’s allow Oakeshott

the point. He admits in Rationalism in Politics:

Nor, finally, do I think that we owe our predicament to the

place which the natural sciences and the manner of thinking

connected with them has come to take in our civilization. . . .

That the influence of the genuine natural scientist is not

necessarily on the side of Rationalism . . . no doubt there are

42

scientists . . . mistaken when they think that the rationalist and

the scientific points of view necessarily coincide. (RIP, 34-35)

So whatever the comments of the “sociology-of-knowledge” Oakeshott, he

is not impugning the genuine achievements of science. Very early on Oakeshott

writes that “the development of biology . . . has been hindered by a moral

interest” (EM, 178). We accept Oakeshott’s concerns about the ubiquitous

honorific usage of the suffix “science” attached to all manner of inquiry, but this is

a completely separate issue from the fact that some scientists are corrupt, arrogant

or incompetent; these are moral failings that have nothing to do with scientific

inquiry.

There is nothing that Oakeshott could possibly object to in Haack’s

suggestion that science should be viewed not

as privileged, but distinguished epistemically; as deserving, if you

will, respect rather than deference. Science is neither sacred nor

a confidence trick . . . (Nor, of course, is science the only source

of knowledge).64

64 Haack, Manifesto, and Defending Science.

43

Taken in modal terms, of course science has truth-value for Oakeshott. Oakeshott

emphasis the modal differences — i.e., one cannot do science (with its

generalizing function and search for universal laws) in the same way one does

history.

VI. Where to From Here?

By way of summary, three inextricable points conspire to create difficulties

for Oakeshott.

(1) Oakeshott’s irreducible plurality of modal worlds forbids any

commonalities — the use of relevant evidence, the use of

logical inference, etc. Oakeshott seems to rule out the notion

that there are general virtues of evidence and inquiry that we

appeal to regardless of the domain of inquiry (a non-

relativistic position) and which does not entail scientism or

partake in the error of irrelevance. Of course the standards of

accuracy and relevance will vary between subject matters —

e.g. we do not expect probability from a geometer or

demonstration from a man of action. This said, a complication

44

arises in Oakeshott’s later addition of poetry as a mode — it is

just a mode of sensibility devoid of evidence or inquiry.

(2) Given this irreducible plurality Oakeshott relies upon some

notion of coherentism. Coherentism in epistemology and

metaphysics — i.e. justification and truth — inherits several

well-known difficulties. It invites transference to ethics, politics,

and society — else we are incoherent in having coherentism in

one sphere and something different in the other. Coherentism

about ethics, politics, and society leads directly to relativism

since it is empirically and conceptually possible for there to be

any number of sets of ethical, political, and social beliefs and

activities which form equally coherent systems, with ex

hypothesi no decidability on grounds of coherence between

them.

(3) Oakeshott’s radical constructivism belies a

revisionist/ameliorant and consequently a relativist critique

that is at the very heart of the constructivist:

45

at the heart of the New Cynicism lies a profound intolerance of

uncertainty and a deep unwillingness to accept that the less than

perfect is a lot better than nothing at all.65

This is Oakeshott’s Rationalist! To point needs to be re-emphasized: If science is

merely a human construction, it should be no surprise that it is amenable or

functional to extraneous purpose or caprice, typically political and economic

power relations.

What is curious is that Oakeshott was well aware of relativism’s self-

defeating tendency. Writing in 1961, Oakeshott criticizes Carr for over

emphasizing a relativistic sociology-of-knowledge approach to historical

theorizing: “the sociology of knowledge cannot swallow up every other attitude

towards knowledge without swallowing itself also, and nothing remains” (WH,

332). Years later, widening the target, he reiterated:

the history of thought is not the same thing as what is called the

“sociology of knowledge”. Indeed, the “sociology of knowledge”

is an unredeemed relic (inherently self-destructive) of the

intellectual legend of the Enlightenment in which all thinking

65 Haack, “Fallibilism,” 36.

46

appeared as a “reflex” determined by so-called “social”

circumstance.” (WH, 371)

Had Oakeshott adopted a more conciliatory position between the “myth of

realism” and what I term the “myth of constructionism” he would not find himself

subject to criticisms I have outlined here. This conciliation could be along the lines

of David Wiggins’s “conceptual realism” already hinted at above — the notion that

there “must still be something we can discover in spite of ourselves:”66 “the mind

‘conceptualises’ objects, yet objects ‘impinge’ upon the mind.”67 After all,

Oakeshott does say, “reality is what we are obliged to think” (EM, 58-59). Only

then can one take existence, identity and truth statements seriously. There needs

to be a reciprocal relation between our conceptual creativity and nature, allowing

nature to intimate, regulate and inform the concepts. The sortal concepts that are

brought to bear upon experience determines what we can find there — just as the

size and mesh of a net determines “not what fish are in the sea, but which ones we

66 Wiggins, Sameness, 67, italics added. Wiggins rejects Geach’s relativity thesis by offering his thesis of

Sortal Dependency of Identity, a highly elaborate and technical argument with extended preliminaries,

qualifications, and amendments.

67 Wiggins, Sameness, 101.

47

shall catch.”68 This is not a species of anti-constructivism that John Dupré

characterizes:

Those most strongly opposed to constructivism are those who

believe that interactions with nature completely determine

scientific belief and, in connection with proper scientific

methodology, determine true beliefs about the world.69

Concepts under which experience is articulated and things singled out determine

the persistence conditions of what is singled only because such concepts determine

‘what’ is singled out.”70 This expunges any vestige of idealism, which ties the

persistence condition to the creative act of mind, and which severely weakens

Oakeshott’s thought. Wiggins’ concern is not merely to act as guardian of

objectivity in human thought, but “to preserve its prospects of passing beyond the

most narrowly anthropocentric.”71 Our concepts are open to being regulated by

reality and as a consequence our understanding approaches a realm not sensitive

68 Wiggins, Sameness, 141

69 John Dupré, “What’s the Fuss about Social Constructivism? EPISTEME 1, no.1 (June 2004): 74.

70 Wiggins, Sameness, 141.

71 Wiggins, Sameness, 141.

48

to the practical. This is surely consonant with Oakeshott’s modal forewarning of

the error of irrelevance.

*********

Text and interpretation are one, Oakeshott observes in “The Concept of a

Philosophical Jurisprudence,” and of no texts is this truer than Oakeshott’s own.72

Commentators can no longer absolve themselves of critically engaging with

Oakeshott on the grounds that because Oakeshott’s thought lies within the

hermeneutic tradition, that some special interpretative approach be accorded him.

Few of us working within the so-called analytic tradition accept the “the

“continental (hermeneutic) /analytical” divide.73 To insist otherwise is rather like

“conceiving America as being divided into Business and Kansas.”74 Of course,

one has to enter into sympathy with a target thinker — any thinker. However,

Oakeshott’s thought can be recast and does offer value to an issue-led style of

philosophizing. Commentators’ haughty complicity with Oakeshott’s well-known

lack of engagement with the philosophical establishment does Oakeshott no

72 “The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence,” Politica, 3 (1938): 203-22, 345-60.

73 http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/analytic.htm [accessed 22nd June 2002]

74 Attributed to John Searle, cited in Barry Smith, “A Theory of Divides”

http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/israel.PDF (accessed June 11, 2004).

49

favors. Furthermore, the suggestive richness of Oakeshott is now beginning to be

recognized in areas Oakeshott himself could not have anticipated — whether or

not he would approve is neither here nor there.

To read Oakeshott is to sense a distinctive intelligence, to discern a

particular attitude. Here, if anywhere, is Pascal’s ‘esprit de finesse’. Yet the

attitude is often hard to make out in specifics. We readily get a broad sense of

what is being rejected, but seldom a precise and unencumbered sense of what is

being held. The preceding discussion acknowledges all this and is offered as a

reading of a brilliant, profound, but elusive mind. Whatever the criticisms leveled

at Oakeshott I am not clear how far any of this would have embarrassed him. He

might just as well re-invoke the Latin dictum: Spartam nactus est, hanc exorna —

‘Sparta is what you have been allotted; do what is best with it’ (RIP, 60).